“... was stalled, too, on the technological frontier that had opened up just across the North Sea, with James Watt’s 1769 patent of the separate-condensing steam engine. Holland had extensive peat deposits, good enough to distil gin (more glow per guilder, less bulky than beer) but not to smelt steel or to drive ships, and little in the way of coal. In 1596 ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such ...”

“... go with their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... Come-On’ and ‘Remembering Lunch’. ‘The Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But ...”

“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... on typography, publishers on publishing, lawyers on the law, copyright experts on copyright, Sir James Pitman on shorthand, Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline ...”

“... proved itself worthy of fiction. It was, before Sallis began his project, one of the foci for James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. Sallis had a proper respect for Burke’s achievements: his sense of place, his pacing, his ease of discourse. Burke was very good on food, on the Gulf, the tension in the transit between easy-living in the ...”

“... proudly appropriated the description to themselves. The Homeric phrase ‘people-devouring king’ (demoboros basileus), applied by Achilles to Agamemnon and later used as a generic term for exploitative tyrants, was picked up by a Jacobin cartoon entitled The People, Devourer of Kings. It shows, in Ronald Paulson’s description, ‘the giant ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”